A Company Intranet is a collection of private networks within a organisation that is for internal use only and cannot be accessed by the public from the internet. In its simplest form an intranet is established with the technologies for local area networks and wide area networks. Currently Intranets have many uses within an organisation, such as sales and customer relationship tools, project management, sophisticated corporate directories, etc. Intranet Design is essential for a Business Intranet to run at peak efficiency.

An Extranet System is when a organization allows somebody outside of the organization to gain access to a subset of the information that is on the organisations intranet. It was during the 1990s and early 2000s that several industries had started using the term "extranet" to describe a centralized repositories of shared data made accessible via the web but only for authorized personal of a particular work group. So an Extranet is basically when data from an Intranet is shared for other people to see.

Intranet

General Use Of An Intranet

• Communication and collaboration (e.g. Audio/video conferencing)
• Web publishing (e.g. Company newsletters)
• Intranet portal management (e.g. Integrating different technologies)
• Business operations and management (e.g. Inventory control)

Thanks to the intranet many different thing can be done and some things can also be done more effectively. Since the intranet is being used being used as corporate culture-change platforms people large numbers of employees are can discuss key issues with forum applications that could lead to new management ideas, improvement in productivity and quality and other corporate issues. With the increase of productivity because of the intranet the ease of access to information and tool/applications needed bye the employees of the company to perform their task. Thanks to the intranet being cost-effective and environmentally friendly since most of your work would be done a form of computer or mobile device. Any updates to the intranet of a organisation the will be sent to all the users so that no user will miss out on any new information or tasks.

SharePoint

One example of intranet software is SharePoint and it's a web-based, collaborative platform that integrates with Microsoft Office. SharePoint is primarily sold as a document management and storage system, but the product is highly configurable and usage varies from organisation to organisation. The product encompasses a wide variety of capabilities, most of which require some configuration and governance.

Office 365

Office 365 refers to subscription plans that includes access to Office applications and other productivity services. Office 365 can be for home and for business. Office 365 plans for business include services such as SharePoint and Skype. Many of the Office 365 plans also include the latest version of Office applications, which users can install across multiple computers and devices. The Office 365 online-only plans are a great choice for certain business needs, and they are designed to work with the latest version of Office for Mac. All Office 365 plans are paid for on a subscription basis, monthly or annually.

Extranet

Advantages

• With the extranet you are able to exchange large volumes of data using Electronic Data Interchange (EDI).
• You are able to share product catalogues exclusively with trade partners.
• You are able to collaborate with other companies on joint development efforts.
• Provide or access services provided by one company to a group of other companies.
• You can jointly develop and use training programs with other companies.

Disadvantages

• Extranets can be rather expensive to implement and maintain within an organization if hosted internally.
• The security of extranets can be a concern when hosting valuable or proprietary information.

You can create a Extranet using application such as Office 365 SharePoint Online. These applications are great example of applications that can be used for the sharing of data and collaboration.